• PA-Sen: Rep. Joe Sestak is actually sounding likelier to jump into the Senate race than he did before Arlen Specter’s party swap. Interviews this week find him taking on a more belligerent tone and staking out an outsider position. Sen. Bob Casey, however, is moving right away to say he’ll support Specter no matter what happens in the primary.
• IN-Sen: A Hamilton Campaigns poll finds Evan Bayh with ridiculously high favorables: 74/23, with even 61% from Republicans. He also has $11.4 million in the bank. You think with that level of popularity maybe he could drop the defensive crouch and stop reflexively opposing his party’s agenda?
• CA-32: As the May 19 special election primary fast approaches, Board of Equalization chair Judy Chu and state Senator Gil Cedillo have started going at each other hammer-and-tongs. Cedillo’s camp has sent out mailers charging Chu with giving special tax breaks to corporate campaign contributors; Chu’s camp responds that they were “routine refunds of overpaid sales taxes.” Chu leads in fundraising and endorsements, but will need to make substantial inroads into the Latino vote in this district with a Latino majority but a large Asian bloc.
• CA-45: We’ve known for a while that openly-gay Palm Springs mayor Steve Pougnet was intending to challenge Rep. Mary Bono Mack in this newly-blue district (still R+3), but he made it official earlier this week.
• AR-St. House: Here’s one I’m still trying to wrap my head around: until this week, there was actually a Green Party member in a state House of Representatives. And it wasn’t Vermont, Maine, or Oregon: it was Arkansas, of all places. Well, that ended this week, as State Rep. Richard Carroll of North Little Rock switches to the Democratic Party today. (The effect of the switch is minimal: Dems now control the House 75-25.)
• Swingnuts’ Delight: Everything you ever wanted to know about the awesome delicacy that is chocolate babka. Stick around here long enough and DavidNYC might send you one! (Hat-tip: reader RC)
While the rest of the South, even Louisiana and Tennessee most recently, has finally moved to the GOP on the state level, Democrats still have massive majorities in these two states’ legislatures and boast two incredibly popular governors in Beebe and Manchin. And yet these were exactly the kinds of states (socially conservative, rural, Ozark or Appalachian heritage with lower-than-average black populations for the South) where Obama did more poorly than Kerry. So strange.
so, state house races go uncontested all the time. There are so many republicans who democrats refuse to challenge. Yet, the Arkansas democratic party, in their infinite wisdom, deicides to threaten a challenge against a green party member? What exactly does this accomplish?
I live in the district in the LA part.
I got four positive mailers from four different candidates on Monday.
A flurry of attack mailers followed on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Dr. Chu sent out another positive mailer that arrived yesterday.
A belligerant Sestak is probably good for us overall. If he can cozy up to labor, he would be a non-insignificant challenge for Specter in the primary, the kind that, if Specter’s history is any indication, would force him to move to the left. From there, our choices are either a left-leaning Specter or Joe Sestak, and either one I can live with. So I like this, in terms of feet-to-the-fire.
Someone needs to take out that unprincipled hack Specter, and not let him represent the Democratic party.